WASHINGTON, D.C., April 8, 2020 (LifeSiteNews) — U.S. President Donald Trump has signaled that he is open to the idea of defunding the World Health Organization (WHO), a pro-abortion U.N. entity with suspicious ties to communist China.
“We‘re going to put a hold on money spent to the WHO. We’re going to put a very powerful hold on it, and we’re going to see,” Trump said early in yesterday’s conference.
Trump continued to criticize the WHO, saying the organization got “every aspect” of its response to the crisis wrong, but he was less definite in his statements about cutting funding when a reporter pressed him: “Is it time to freeze [U.S.] funding to the WHO during a pandemic?”
“No, maybe not. I am not saying that I am going to do it, but we are going to look at it,” Trump replied. “We are going to investigate it, we are going to look into it…but we will look at ending funding because you know what? They called it wrong, and if you look back over the years, even, they’re very much — everything seems to be very biased towards China. That's not right.”
The U.S. president repeatedly cited the WHO’s criticism of his decision in January to issue a travel ban on foreign nationals who had recently been in China, as well as suggesting that the WHO knew about the spread of the coronavirus in Wuhan early on in the outbreak and that it chose not to report it.
“How many factors seem to come down on the side of China?” Trump asked.
“Don’t close your borders to China, don’t do this. They don’t report what's really going on. They didn’t see it, and yet they were there. They didn’t see what was going on in Wuhan. They didn’t see it. How do you not see it? They didn’t see it. They didn’t report it if they did see. They must have seen it, but they didn’t report it,” he said.
“They seem to err always on the side of China, and we fund it, so I want to look into it.”
Trump’s press conference statements followed a tweet he posted earlier in the day yesterday criticizing the WHO.
“The W.H.O. really blew it. For some reason, funded largely by the United States, yet very China centric. We will be giving that a good look. Fortunately I rejected their advice on keeping our borders open to China early on. Why did they give us such a faulty recommendation?” Trump wrote.
The W.H.O. really blew it. For some reason, funded largely by the United States, yet very China centric. We will be giving that a good look. Fortunately I rejected their advice on keeping our borders open to China early on. Why did they give us such a faulty recommendation?
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 7, 2020
The U.S. is the largest contributor to the WHO’s annual budget. Last week, the United Nations secretary-general, António Guterres, announced he wants 100 billion USD for the organization as part of the attempt to combat the coronavirus.
Dr. Hans Kluge, WHO regional director for Europe, responded to Trump’s remarks, saying: “We are still in the acute phase of a pandemic so now is not the time to cut back on funding.”
Dr. Bruce Aylward, senior adviser to the WHO director general, who made headlines recently for ignoring questions about Taiwan (whose sovereignty China denies), also defended the WHO’s work with China.
“It was absolutely critical in the early part of this outbreak to have full access to everything possible, to get on the ground and work with the Chinese to understand this,” he said. “This is what we did with every other hard hit country like Spain and had nothing to do with China specifically.”
Steven Mosher, China expert and president of the Population Research Institute, has argued that in addition to helping create the pandemic by repeating the communist Chinese government’s false propaganda denying the health risks of COVID-19, the WHO’s long-term promotion of contraception and abortion has hindered the global response to the crisis.
“If the clinics in Third World countries had been stocked with medicine instead of abortifacients and contraceptives, they would be better able to cope with the current pandemic,” said Mosher. “In other words, population control programs cost lives.”
“The WHO, by parroting Chinese propaganda, helped to spread the pandemic. Even now, they are continuing to claim that China is a ‘model’ for how to contain the pandemic,” Mosher told LifeSite. “They are part of the problem, not part of the solution.”
Mosher said the U.S. should cut off funding to the WHO altogether unless its current head, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, resigns. In January, Ghebreyesus repeated the Chinese government’s false claim that COVID-19 is not transmissible to humans.
Mosher noted that the WHO receives more than 22% of its funding from the United States and that much of the money “goes towards the salary, benefits and perks of an inflated, dysfunctional bureaucracy. In other words, it is simply wasted.”
Maria Madise of Voice of the Family told LifeSiteNews that Trump cutting U.S. funding to the WHO would be a “most welcome and necessary move.”
“Apart from WHO’s scandalous delay in reporting on the extent of the outbreak of coronavirus in Wuhan, we keep hearing interventions by the representatives of WHO attacking the inviolable rights of life and the family under the guise of tackling the pandemic,” Madise said.
“Prompted by COVID-19, WHO is working on classifying abortion as an ‘essential health service’ so that abortion could go on under lockdown. Yesterday we learned from WHO’s executive director of emergencies programme that in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, officials may have to enter homes and remove family members who are sick,” she continued.
“Since WHO’s first director, Dr. Brock Chisholm, wrote in 1948: ‘Children have to be freed from … religious and other cultural prejudices forced upon them by parents and religious authorities,’ WHO’s anti-life and anti-family track record has not improved. Policies against life and the family are inevitably policies against health and should not be funded by countries who value life and the family.”
Michael Robinson, director of parliamentary communications for U.K. pro-life group the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children (SPUC), told LifeSite that “the pro-life movement needs immediately to get behind President Trump to encourage him to continue to take this stand in defence of human life and in defence of the family.”
“The WHO is an immensely powerful international body which represents a major threat to the life and health of people worldwide. It is especially dangerous to human life and well-being at this time of pandemic for which they have been preparing themselves for years,” Robinson said.
“In 2012, for example, they published a policy brief titled “Integrating sexual and reproductive health into health emergency and disaster risk management”, which foresaw a Coronavirus-type crisis. And the WHO makes it clear again and again that abortion — killing the unborn — is an essential part of ‘reproductive health,’” he continued.
“In particular, the WHO is a threat to the moral welfare of our children. For the past 10 years they have been promoting in Europe and elsewhere so-called ‘Standards for Sexuality Education’ which contains a thinly-veiled warning to teachers not to obstruct children's so-called sexual rights or children's access to secret abortions without parental knowledge or consent; and which presents self-abuse as a human right.”
“Thank God for President Trump in taking this stand against the WHO, which in effect is a defence of all of us against their aggressive anti-life and anti-family policies.”